Читать книгу Wealth - Yuval Elmelech - Страница 34

Studying what he terms the “power elite,” Mills (1956) describes a two-stage process of wealth accumulation in the hands of the elite: the “Big Jump” and the “Accumulation of Advantage.” The Big Jump, defined as “an opportunity to command a large sum of financial resources,” describes the starting point of the process. Since only a small percentage of households experience such a jump, inequality in economic resources by family of origin is where scholars of wealth stratification look for information on the formation of initial advantages. In addition to inequality at the point of initiation (endowments or lack thereof), the direction and gradient of mobility over the family life course are neither uniform nor universal. As noted earlier, the process of wealth accumulation involves distinct opportunities that people experience over the life course both in the private, familial sphere—intragenerational exchanges, such as assortative mating, income pooling, and economies of scale (Sweeney and Cancian 2004; Charles et al. 2013), and intergenerational wealth transfers that pass down from older to younger generations (Albertini et al. 2007)—and in the public sphere, in the form of rewards in various domains and markets, from education to earnings to profitable financial investments.

Importantly, as the following chapters will reveal, life-course trajectories in the domestic or family sphere and in the public sphere of domains and markets are strongly interdependent, and within each sphere trajectories are often path-dependent and have enduring consequences for wealth attainment. Scholars of stratification note that advantages early in life can lead to exponential growth in socioeconomic returns later in life; early disadvantages, on the other hand, often lead to additional handicaps and downward social mobility. The systematic pattern of these processes—a pattern captured by the “cumulative advantage/disadvantage” (CA/D) framework (Merton 1968, 1995; DiPrete and Eirich 2006)—results in rising inequality.